This seminar examines the relationship between text and image, exploring the tensions and dynamics between the photographic image and literature, focusing on the slippage between autobiography and fiction. The collecting of fragments forms a part of many visual art practices, the potential of which creates powerful poetic associations, where fixity gives way to fluidity and where syntax can embrace both the lyrical as well as the dissonant.
This class will span a range of topics and events centered around the relationship photography has to ideas of narrative, considering montage, collage, editing, layering and fragmentation as a means to create new stories and bodies of visual work. Participants will each produce a ‘publication’, bringing together the textual and the visual through an exploration of the photographic and literary fragment. Sessions will include artist talks, seminars, studio writing, photography workshops and critique sessions looking at students’ process and research and developing these through discussion.
Christopher Stewart, The Colony
Esther Teichmann, Heavy the Sea, 2016
Selected texts:
Photography and writing:
Berger, John and Moir, Jean, Another Way of Telling, Writers and Readers Publishing Cooperative Society Ltd., London 1982
Davey, Moyra, Index Cards, Fitcarraldo Editions, London 2020
Sebald, W.G., The Rings of Saturn, Harvile Press, London 1998
Robertson, Robin, The Long Take, Picador, London 2018
Literature of the fragment:
Ballard, J.G., The Atrocity Exhibition, Fourth Estate, London 2014
Barthes, Roland, A Lover's Discourse: Fragments, Vintage, London, 2002
Cooper, Jeremy, Ash Before Oak, Fitzcarraldo Editions, London 2019
Mallo, Agustin Fernandez (trans. Bunstead, Thomas), Nocilla Dream, Fitcarraldo Editions, London 2017
Rankine, Claudia, Citizen, Penguin, London 2015
Vonnegut, Kurt, Cat’s Cradle, Penguin Modern Classics, London 2008
Autobiography and fiction/non-fiction:
Eribon, Didier (trans. Lucey, Michael), Returning to Reims, Penguin, London 2019
Ernaux, Annie, The Years, Fitzcarraldo Editions, London 2020
Fournier, Lauren, Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and Criticism, MIT, 2021
Genet, Jean, The Thief’s Journal, Faber and Faber, London 2019
Louis, Édouard (trans. Lucey, Michael), The End of Eddy, Vintage, London 2018
Key photographic works:
Fish Story by Alan Sekula (originally published in 1995), Mack, 2018
Goftare Nik by Shirana Shabazi, Hatje Cantz, 2003
if one thing matters, everything matters by Wolfgang Tillmans, Tate Publishing, 2003
A Life Full of Holes by Yto Barrada, Autograph, 1999
Illuminance by Rinko Kawauchi, Aperture, 2011
The Sweet Flypaper of Life by Roy DeCarava and Langston Hughes (originally published in 1955), First Print Press, 2018
American Photographs by Walker Evans (originally published in 1938), Museum of Modern Art, 2012
Evidence by Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel (originally published in 1977), Distributed Art Publishers, 2017
Waffenruhe by Michael Schmidt (originally published in 1987), Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther Konig, 2018
Redheaded Peckerwood by Christian Patterson, Mack, 2011
Robert Frank the Americans (originally published in 1958), Steidl, 2008
My Birth by Carmen Winant, Self Publish Be Happy, 2018
Atlas by Gerhard Richter – Friedel, Helmut (ed.) (2007), Thames and Hudson Ltd., 2007